Sign In

Amy West: November 2009 Archives

ALA Connect is the American Library Association's social network. Because it's relatively new, usage by ALA members is probably still pretty low. However, it has a lot of potential and some units within ALA have begun it to conduct their business between conferences.

If you are a current ALA member, you can go to http://connect.ala.org and login with your ALA member number and password. Once you're in, you can set up your profile and email notifications. You may choose to be notified whenever something happens in every group to which you belong or on a group-by-group basis. Additionally, if you hold a committee or elected position in ALA, your membership should be reflected under "My ALA Groups".

Pros:

Keep up with committee activities

Move working materials from private to public with one click

Find like-minded librarians in a very large organization (forthcoming)

Have content of interest from other parts of ALA pushed to you (forthcoming)

Cons:

Yet another single-purpose network

Many groups in ALA have already developed workable methods for managing their work

Usefulness for members not on committees or in elected positions unclear

"Ning is a platform
for creating your own social network. Our passion is putting new social
networks in the hands of anyone with a good idea. With Ning, your
social network can be for anything and anyone. You start by naming your
social network and choosing a combination of features (photos, videos,
forums, events, etc.) from an ever-growing list of options. You can
then customize your social network's appearance and launch it! People
who join your social network will automatically have a customizable
profile page and will be able to message and friend each other."

It differs from Facebook and Myspace in that each of those tools combine both the platform and the network together whereas Ning provides the tools for lots of different networks. Each network is independent and you would sign up for each one separately.

The fact that Ning networks can be single-purpose has benefits and drawbacks. I rarely ever interact with the Ning to which I belong because I just don't have a particular need to do so. Since other tools like Facebook and Twitter cross personal and professional boundaries, I'm much more likely to go to them on a regular basis. I did just subscribe to the RSS feeds for the Library 2.0 ning, but so far, they've been quiet.

Pros:

Lots of features - blogs, forums, audio, video, chat, photo hosting, many more

"Twitter is a free communication and social networking tool which allows
you to convey short messages of up to 140 characters to your circle of
friends via the Twitter website, SMS, email, IM, or other Twitter
client. Messages appear not only within your profile on Twitter, but
are sent to your community of followers who have signed up to receive
your updates."

Features to consider include whether a client can update other social networks, whether it threads conversations in Twitter and whether it allows you to manage multiple accounts.

I've tried about 6 or 7 different clients myself and so far have settled on Nambu because it threads conversations. However, they're developing a new version of the software and no downloads are available.